UFC Fighter Nick Diaz’s Ban for Marijuana Unlikely to Hold

Kirik Jenness, the Association of Boxing Commissions’ official record keeper for the sport of MMA, has spoken out against the commission’s decision to ban UFC fighter Nick Diaz for 5 years for testing positive for marijuana.

“I’m part of the regulation process. I’m the record keeper for the sport, and I’m very, very proud of that. I’ve defended commissions hundreds, probably thousands of times in different circumstances. This is one of the very first times I was embarrassed by a commission,” said Jenness. He continued by stating that: “It was unjust. It’s just not justifiable any way you look at it. They have new guidelines for marijuana that are stricter than the ones they had before, and the third marijuana failure is three years. [For Nick Diaz] they made it five years pretty much arbitrarily because they didn’t like Nick Diaz’s attitude.”

The ban originated from earlier in 2015 when Nick Diaz was drug tested three times within a few hours on a fight night. Diaz passed two drug tests conducted by WADA-accredited labs, but a third test was conducted by a less-reputable lab, with proper protocol not followed, and the result produced a sudden and extraordinarily high level of a marijuana metabolite.

Jenness thinks that, like Nevada’s recent lifetime ban of Wanderlei Silva, which was subsequently struck down by an actual court, the commission’s suspension of Diaz will not last.